A startup engineered mRNA that activates only inside cancer cells, triggering the immune system to destroy them while staying inert in healthy tissue. The approach took twelve years to develop and is now entering patient trials.
They want to make a therapy that goes straight for the tumor and leaves the rest of your body alone. We're trying to get the mRNA to go into the tumors, have the tumors create a protein that the immune system will then recognize and come and kill those cells because we want to take the tumors out. The tumors can be all over the body. They can be deep inside of the body. They can be in the lungs. They can be in your liver. And you don't want the immune system attacking any of the healthy cells. That's where you get, you know, all sorts of toxicities that are associated with cancer drugs. And so we want to program the the messenger RNA to be able to say, I'm inside of a cancer cell, I should actuate my program and cause this protein to be produced. But if it ends up in the liver cell or in a kidney cell, then nothing happens. The program is inert. No protein that causes the immune system to respond is going to be produced. And that is very difficult. We spent 6 years before the company started working on that tech, and then we spent the last 6 years here really perfecting it and now taking it into patients.
